4 ms·

> I'm sorry, I know it's fun to bash on managers but they exist for a purpose The point is that it's possible to run a company where managers don't have a purp

> I'm sorry, I know it's fun to bash on managers but they exist for a purpose The point is that it's possible to run a company where managers don't have a purpose and aren't necessary.

pmjordan 16y ago
At Google's scale? Successfully? I find that rather unlikely. If you have any examples of this, please do share. Otherwise, all I can imagine is reducing the depth of the tree, and in some cases not to make it a strict tree, but a somewhat interconnected graph. (that said, throwing people into distinct "manager" and "engineer" bins is disingenuous anyway, a manager managing engineers had better have some kind of engineering understanding)
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similarly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
  - kwis 16y ago
    Mondragon has annual revenues of €174/employee. I have trouble viewing that as a proven model.
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      I'm pretty sure the revenues on Wikipedia are off, and I can't find what reference they're using to get that number. This study from around 2002/2003 puts their revenues at $8 billion annually with 60,000 employees. That puts their per-employee revenues at around $133k. http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/papers/Herrera.pdf http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/p... This puts their revenues at $24.2 billion in 2008, which is almost $300k per employee, if you use the ~85,000 employees figure. http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/01/the-mondragon-cooperative-a-blueprint-for-america.html http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/0...
      - kwis 16y ago
        It looks like I got confused because whoever edited the wikipedia article came from a country that uses '.' as a thousands separator. Looking more closely, they're a strange sort of conglomerate. At a glance, I see two banks, two insurance companies, roughly two hundred industrial companies, a dozen retail shops, a dozen food-related businesses, a dozen research firms, and ten education companies. In a way, it reminds me of Idealab, in that each new company is a new pool of equity (with the associated incentives that result from ownership), and that failures are not punished, but rather result in retraining or placement in a different firm. (for full co-op members). It's also interesting to see that the founder was a priest who started off with a co-operative polytechnic school and bootstrapped everything from that base.
    - brianleb 16y ago
      174/employee was calculated by assuming that the period in the number of employees is a comma while the period in revenue is a period (e.g. 17M/85K employees instead of 17B/85K employees). So those figures would indicate 174,000 Euros per employee, which makes a lot more sense.
  - wtn 16y ago
    Semco SA, the Brazilian conglomerate, would probably be a more relevant example of corporate re-engineering.
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      I mention Semco elsewhere in the thread, but Mondragon is 30x bigger than Semco, and yet still operates effectively as a horizontal organization.
  - vacri 16y ago
    I fail to see how that will help keep a driven, ambitious person happy as a career frontline customer support staffer.

> I'm sorry, I know it's fun to bash on managers but they exist for a purpose The point is that it's possible to run a company where managers don't have a purpose and aren't necessary.

pmjordan 16y ago

At Google's scale? Successfully? I find that rather unlikely. If you have any examples of this, please do share. Otherwise, all I can imagine is reducing the depth of the tree, and in some cases not to make it a strict tree, but a somewhat interconnected graph. (that said, throwing people into distinct "manager" and "engineer" bins is disingenuous anyway, a manager managing engineers had better have some kind of engineering understanding)

michaelchisari 16y ago
The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similarly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
- kwis 16y ago
  Mondragon has annual revenues of €174/employee. I have trouble viewing that as a proven model.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    I'm pretty sure the revenues on Wikipedia are off, and I can't find what reference they're using to get that number. This study from around 2002/2003 puts their revenues at $8 billion annually with 60,000 employees. That puts their per-employee revenues at around $133k. http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/papers/Herrera.pdf http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/p... This puts their revenues at $24.2 billion in 2008, which is almost $300k per employee, if you use the ~85,000 employees figure. http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/01/the-mondragon-cooperative-a-blueprint-for-america.html http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/0...
    - kwis 16y ago
      It looks like I got confused because whoever edited the wikipedia article came from a country that uses '.' as a thousands separator. Looking more closely, they're a strange sort of conglomerate. At a glance, I see two banks, two insurance companies, roughly two hundred industrial companies, a dozen retail shops, a dozen food-related businesses, a dozen research firms, and ten education companies. In a way, it reminds me of Idealab, in that each new company is a new pool of equity (with the associated incentives that result from ownership), and that failures are not punished, but rather result in retraining or placement in a different firm. (for full co-op members). It's also interesting to see that the founder was a priest who started off with a co-operative polytechnic school and bootstrapped everything from that base.
  - brianleb 16y ago
    174/employee was calculated by assuming that the period in the number of employees is a comma while the period in revenue is a period (e.g. 17M/85K employees instead of 17B/85K employees). So those figures would indicate 174,000 Euros per employee, which makes a lot more sense.
- wtn 16y ago
  Semco SA, the Brazilian conglomerate, would probably be a more relevant example of corporate re-engineering.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    I mention Semco elsewhere in the thread, but Mondragon is 30x bigger than Semco, and yet still operates effectively as a horizontal organization.
- vacri 16y ago
  I fail to see how that will help keep a driven, ambitious person happy as a career frontline customer support staffer.